What is XConf?

No fluff. No filler. Just real tech

XConf is a conference created by technologists, for technologists, who care deeply about the craft of software and its ability to make the world a better place. Join us at XConf Singapore with Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks as our keynote speaker! Listen to ThoughtWorkers and guest speakers share their knowledge and experience on data, machine learning, product innovation, and much more!

Date: 23rd April 2019 | Time: 8am- 1pm | Price: S$150

﻿Venue: Capitol Theatre Singapore, 11 Stamford Road

Keynote from Martin Fowler

Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks

I'm an author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development. I concentrate on designing enterprise software - looking at what makes a good design and what practices are needed to come up with good design. I've been a pioneer of various topics around object-oriented technology and agile methods, and written several books including "Refactoring", "UML Distilled", "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture", and "NoSQL Distilled". For the last decade I've worked at ThoughtWorks, a really rather good system delivery and consulting firm, and I write at http://martinfowler.com.

Agenda

8:00 Registration

8:45 Welcome

9:00

Keynote: Software Design in the 21st Century by Martin Fowler

In the last decade or so we've seen a number of new ideas added to the mix to help us effectively design our software. Patterns help us capture the solutions and rationale for using them. Refactoring allows us to alter the design of a system after the code is written. Agile methods, in particular Extreme Programming, give us a highly iterative and evolutionary approach which is particularly well suited to changing requirements and environments. Martin Fowler has been a leading voice in these techniques and will give a suite of short talks featuring various aspects of how these and other developments affect our software development.

9:45

Stop Asking your Customers what they want (Observe, Measure and have the Courage to Experiment) by Naren Katakam

Customers are not going to lead you to the utopia of product innovation but you do need to know what to focus on to learn from your customers. This talk will focus on how to enable organisations to run thousands of experiments per year and create a culture that allows for constant failure, learning and iteration. We will take you through the principles, processes, and practices on how to use hypothesis-driven experimentation for the specific purpose of accelerating decision velocity to push you forward and give you a leg up on your competitors.

10:15 Break

10:45

Fireside Chat with Ajey Gore, Group CTO, Go-Jek

11:15

Continuous Intelligence: Moving AI from Proof of Concept to Production by David Tan and Sowmya Krishnan

Despite the hype around machine learning and AI, the lifecycle of ML models often end in kaggle competitions, hackathons and proof of concepts. Very few make it to production because individuals and teams inevitably encounter impediments in data governance deployments, model management, and reproducibility, just to name a few.

To overcome these challenges, we need to put in place the right tools, processes and supporting infrastructure. In this talk, we will share principles and practices on how we can build end-to-end machine learning pipelines to enable teams to iteratively deliver value.

Our Speakers

Ajey Gore

Ajey Gore is Group CTO at GoJek, with 20 years of experience in building core technology strategy across diverse domains, Ajey is helping GoJek deliver a transport, logistics, lifestyle and payments platform - offering 18 products, owned and operated by GoJek. Ajey’s interests include machine learning, networking and scaling products. Ajey founded CodeIgnition, which was acquired by GoJek, before that Ajey served ThoughtWorks as Head of Technology. Ajey is active influencer in technology community, organises not-for-profit conferences such as RubyConf, GopherCon and DevOpsDays through his not for profit organisation.

Sau Sheong Chang

Sau Sheong has been doing software development for 24 years, mostly managing engineering teams to develop products. He is active in the Ruby and Go developer communities, contributes to open source projects and frequently speaks at meetups and conferences. Sau Sheong has also published 4 programming-related books, on Ruby, Go and R. He currently works for Singapore Power on digital transformation for the company. Sau Sheong is based out of sunny Singapore and has in his career worked for PayPal, HP, Yahoo, and also ran a technology startup during the dot-com days.

Naren Katakam

Naren is a Lead Designer and Product Strategist at ThougthWorks Singapore. Naren has over 13 years of experience in working on all aspects of product solutioning, from interface design to product strategy from blue sky conceptualization to thin slice solutioning, from creating user journey flows to information architecture, from defining key product metrics to growth hacking.

He has helped companies apply design thinking to gain deeper customer insights, innovate existing products, services and build a new line of products & experiences by focusing on delivering value to customers.

Sowmya Krishnan

Sowmya serves ThoughtWorks as a Senior consultant, Data Engineer; currently leading the Intelligent Empowerment offering for Thoughtworks SEA. She has more than 9 years of experience, spanning core infrastructure frameworks, low-latency financial exchange connectivity systems, writing data ingestion pipelines to architecting and building modern data platforms. For the last 4+ years, she has been focused on the data architecture space, solving data engineering problems using the big data stack. Sowmya is very passionate about solving social problems leveraging the power of data, wherever possible.

David Tan

David is a consultant at ThoughtWorks and data science enthusiast. He was also a trainer for the ThoughtWorks JumpStart! coaching program. During his career, David has worked on several projects spanning business intelligence, data analytics, and web development. He is passionate about learning and enjoys sharing his knowledge at meetups and conferences.